So already, when is a field a mountaintop?- When it offers a "peak" experience.
- When, since you were a child, you've been unable to hear the song "The Sound of Music" without envisioning Julie Andrews* singing it exuberantly while running across a rolling meadow high in the Austrian Alps.
I bring this up because recently, I've been thinking again about the field in front of my husband Scott's and my cabin just over the New York border from Massachusetts. As some of you know, I've written about the field in past years as I've prepared for the Jewish High Holidays, often in conjunction with Simon Jacobson's 60 Days: A Spiritual Guide to the High Holidays.** In particular, I've written about the difficulties I've had stepping into the field, and especially with walking up to God--the King in the Field--and asking Him for what I want or need:"When
the king is in the field . . . every person has the opportunity,
without petitioning for an audience, to go over to him, say hello and
ask for whatever he or she needs. The king is smiling, . . ., and he is
predisposed to grant all requests. . . . It is a profound message of
hope that we don't have to wait for Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur to find
G-d. We can go out to meet Him now" (26).
For reasons I don't fully understand, this particular "invitation" to connect with God has always filled me with feelings of both yearning and failure. Though on rare occasions I have spoken directly and personally to God on my own behalf, my inclination is not to do so.
But here's the irony: I love the field and generally feel that God is there as a presence, though not as a King. I associate the field with a state of integrated heart and mind that I seldom achieve in other places. Its natural beauty, seasonal cycles, and inherent spirit, combined with the quality of the time Scott and I spend together there, often makes the time I spend there a peak experience for me, so much so that when it's time to go home, I often find myself musing on the idea expressed on the back cover of Jacobson's book: "It's one thing to find happiness and life affirmation when we escape to a mountain; it's quite another to be able to experience it when we are immersed in cruel, material life." Much as I may want to sustain the field feelings when I'm back home, I know too well from experience that I won't be able to for very long.
But am I confusing peak experience with some other kind of important positive experience? The bliss that I feel on my best trips to the field is not momentary; it extends over a period of days and leaves me deeply at ease rather than breathless with wonder. Can an experience be considered "peak" if it doesn't take one's breath away? And do such distinctions even matter? Isn't it enough to know there are multiple kinds of really positive experiences?
A funny thing happened to me on my way way to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur this year: as I was yet again working my way through 60 Days, I encountered some statements about the field that I'd completely overlooked in previous years:
Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur are holidays. Elul [the Jewish month during which Jews prepare themselves for these holidays that happen early in the month of Tishrei] is amid workdays. We are in the field, we are still living our normal lives. Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur have a very powerful energy, because on those days we petition the King in his inner sanctum. But in Elul, we petition the King on our turf (26).***
The field as my turf? In how many blog posts had I positioned myself on the edge of or at top of the field that I had characterized as sacred and set apart from the places where I transacted the daily business of living among other people in the world?
Why had I overlooked this idea of the field, I wondered. My only explanation was that for decades. so much of my daily life has largely transpired on city streets and subway trains, in traffic jams and crowded squares, and in buildings and courtyards--places not at all reminiscent of fields. So in my life, the Berlin field and others not only represent, but actually are departures from "my turf."
But wait. Why was I obsessing over this? And about the criteria for peak experiences? "What a waste of time," I said suddenly said out loud --and then turned off my computer in disgust.
But as I did, I remembered one of the questions I'd posed to myself as I'd begun my Elul reflections: "How can I break the habit of letting my mind get in the way of my heart?" Clearly, I hadn't made very much progress in this focus area.
The next morning, I awoke with no insights, and got busy with my day. I planned to visit my dad's grave at Sharon Memorial Park--it's Jewish tradition to visit the graves of loved ones before the High Holidays--before heading over to see my mother on the Skilled Nursing Floor at Orchard Cove. I shoved Sarah Hurwitz's Here All Along: Finding Meaning, Spirituality, and a Deeper Connection to Life--in Judaism (After Finally Choosing to Look There) *(4) into my bag just before leaving: I always a bring a book with me in case my mother takes an extended nap while I'm with her.
As usual, I got lost in Sharon Memorial Park. And I just had to laugh when I realized that now I lost in both the maze of the cemetery and the metaphor maze of my mind's making.
Finally, I found my dad's grave, where I spent some time imagining his voice and seeing his smile. And then I thought about how he is feeling increasingly gone to me: after all, my new grand-nephew--my dad's second great-grandson--could only have been given my dad's name--Benjamin David--if my dad were dead. And at the same time, I recognized that through this naming, my dad is somehow living on in the person of this beautiful little baby boy who will never know his voice and smile.
I would have liked to stay in the cemetery just a little bit longer, but the clock was ticking, and I didn't want to be late to Orchard Cove: for sure my dad would have wanted me to spend more time with my mother than at his grave. He always put her ahead of himself; he always put life ahead of death.
My mother was very cheerful when I arrived at her place, but she did sleep for about a third of my visit. So I had the opportunity to read most of the "Freeing God from 'His' Human-Shaped Cage in the Sky" chapter in Hurwitz's book.
It turned out to be just what I needed--a book that had questions that mattered and some answers to them. So thrilled was I to come upon them that I actually thanked my mother, my father, Sarah Hurwitz, and God (variously conceived, imagined, and explained in Hurwitz's chapter) for having combined forces to give me the opportunity to read it.
Early in the chapter, Hurwitz explains that "a God-shaped wall" had stood between her and God because she knew only one way to think about God: as "a Father/King in the sky who performs miracles, rewards us if we're good, punishes us if we're bad, and really enjoys our repetitive prayers to Him" (53). That wall began to crumble only after she went on a multi-day Jewish meditation retreat, and, in its aftermath, continued studying Judaism, but with a new understanding of where she had been going wrong before*****:
That retreat was when I first realized that I had been approaching the question of God backward. I had been starting with theology rather than experience. And even worse, I had been focusing on one particularly difficult theology--a theology that serves as a wall to the Divine for many modern Jews. (60)
It turned out that, like me, Hurwitz was generally prone to follow her mind before following her heart. As I reflected on the shift she knew she had to make, I realized again that the field is somewhere I actually did experience the Divine--until I tried to shoehorn that Divinity into the form of the King, to whom I should be speaking directly and am not.
Hurwitz further comforted me--and included me--when she said, "While there are few things Jews agree on, there seems to be consensus that we cannot fully understand or adequately describe God" (62). After the retreat, she studied various Jewish conceptions of God; in fact, her book describes--yes, it seems somewhat contradictory that she would set out to describe them--at least nine different conceptions. There were more choices than I knew.
In retrospect, Hurwitz learned another important lesson from doing her research, a companion lesson to the first that she learned: that "theology could be a gateway to even greater experience, expanding my sense of where and how the Divine could be" (63). Personally, I was glad that Hurwitz didn't talk about any fields--she'd said the Father/King was in the sky, not in the field--since I was tired of trying to apply metaphors to "spiritual realities" and, in the process, further distancing myself from the reality of the Divine.
For Scott, the field is the field—a place, not a
symbol or metaphor, even though he experiences it and natural places generally as imbued with "spirit," a word he doesn't worry about capitalizing or not. If it offers an invitation to him, it’s an invitation to explore, to
observe, to inquire, and sometimes to paint and draw. Earlier this month when I asked him why he'd extended the path around the field a few years back, he explained that his one purpose was to lessen the threat of Lyme Disease to both of us: where there are deer, there are deer ticks, and on a recent morning, we had seven deer in the field.
From Scott's perspective, the field and the path around it are one, despite the path's shorter grass, courtesy of his new weed-wacker. During
his childhood summers, he simply walked through the fields on his grandparents' property in West Stockbridge, seeking to avoid only the shorter thorn bushes that occasionally cropped up among the tall, hissing grasses as he made his way through them. He still misses those days of parting waist- and chest-high grasses with his
arms.
For me, the field and the path around it are both places and symbols. The path represents my personal journey around and in relationship to the field, the more traditional symbol of the potential for connecting with God during the month of Elul.
Sometimes I envy Scott his less complicated but no less profound relationship with the field and the path: there are certainly times I would rather just be at the field and not think about it what it stands for and requires. And on the other hand, sometimes I like thinking about the field as being more than a field.
Since reading Sarah Hurwitz, I feel newly empowered to choose between, or even to alternate between,"just a field" and "more than just a field." As Scott said this morning, "Metaphors aren't truth." They're merely products of imaginations intended to guide us or enlighten us. If certain ones don't work for us, or cease to work for us over time, we should push them to the side and find ones that do.
Tonight begins the new Jewish year. Shanah Tovah U'metukah! May 5784 be a sweet, beautiful new year for us all, one in which we find the tools and truths we need, or they find us.
* from the Amazon web site: https://www.amazon.com/Sound-Music-40th-Anniversary/dp/B0006OR0VC/ref=asc_df_B0006OR0VC/?tag=hyprod-20&linkCode=df0&hvadid=385619273957&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10310214093701885398&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002014&hvtargid=pla-403761234434&psc=1&tag=&ref=&adgrpid=82333347721&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvadid=385619273957&hvpos=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=10310214093701885398&hvqmt=&hvdev=c&hvdvcmdl=&hvlocint=&hvlocphy=9002014&hvtargid=pla-403761234434
** Jacobson, S. (2008). 60 days: A spiritual guide to the high holidays. New York: Kiyum Press.
*** Pieter the Elder Bruegel The Corn Harvest (August) Oil Painting Reproduction https://www.pieter-bruegel-the-elder.org/The-Corn-Harvest-August.html
**** Hurwitz, S. (2019). Here all along: Finding meaning, spirituality, and a deeper connection to life--in Judaism (after finally choosing to look there). Spiegel & Grau.
*(5) X image for @HereAllAlong: https://twitter.com/HereAllAlong/photo
